Hugh Pickens writes "Judge Roger Hunt has unsealed the private agreement between Righthaven and the Las Vegas Review-Journal that has allowed Righthaven to sue over more than 250 charities, indigent hobby bloggers, reporters, and the newspaper's own sources, for $150,000 each in damages and forfeiture of the sites' domain names, and the furnishing of the agreement could end up being ruinous for Righthaven's operation of copyright lawsuits. The problem is that Stephens Media, the company that owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal, didn't really assign any of the rights related to copyright to Righthaven except the right to sue — and that has been found in Silvers vs. Sony big screen* to be illegal under case law. In other words, none of the necessary things that come with a copyright — such as the right to make copies of a work, or grade it, or make 'derivative works' — were handed off to Righthaven. Only the right to sue was given, and that makes the copyright efficient bogus, argue lawyers for the egalitarian Underground, which is being sued for one of its website users posting the first four paragraphs of a 34 paragraph story."

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Mark